AVAILABILITY: Active Record (Readily Available)

Publication Date: 2008
Publisher: Empty Bowl

Description: “The best poetry is out in the country - farmers singing rice-planting songs.” - Basho (1644-1694), translated by Robert Sund

Working the Woods, Working the Sea is a unique collection of poetry and prose by Gary Snyder, Tom Jay, Holly Hughes, Tim McNulty, Jim Dodge and many more on the North Pacific Coast. Deeply connected to the earth and sea through physical work, these writers speak eloquently of the beauty and power of their environments and of their shared labor and sense of community. With its wit, song and wisdom, this book will take you out to sea and back to the land.

Review(s): “These mud-flecked prose lines and skinned-knuckle sweat poems out-sparkle every diamond necklace at Tiffany’s.” - Tom Robbins, novelist

"In Working the Woods, Working the Sea, more than thirty men and women who labor under the fluent gray skies of the Pacific Northwest craft tales of experience that, collected here, body forth a real world. Several now-classic pieces and much fine new prose and poetry make palpable the falling, hauling, shivering, stooping, mending, gutting, reveling, and grieving moments entailed in earning a living by logging, tree planting, or fishing. Short on illusion, long on truth, here's literature imbued with sweat, necessity, and the daimons of place." - Stephanie Mills

"This new edition of Working the Woods, Working the Sea feels revolutionary. First it shows that the North Pacific Coast late in the twentieth century produced a literature distinct & salty as anyone's. Second, here is a book that puts work - back-wrenching, mud-on-your boots work - at the fulcrum of culture. Wilcox and Gorsline's crew are ecologically savvy, and bring us word from the other postmodernism. Not the official version, which squandered the revolution when its poets stepped into universities, the corporate grant circuit, & the dot.com world. Nobody in Working the Woods, Working the Sea drew down paychecks as armchair Marxists, or took over the liberal weeklies. If they look rough and unwashed, well, Hesiod & Chaucer also looked rough, with smoke in their hair, shirts, & pantcuffs. These writers have worked, wept, laughed, fought to restore watersheds, sworn, spit, and made sharp little poems, durable essays. If you learned to read poetry in what Jack Spicer calls the English department of the soul, you better buy this book." - Andrew Schelling

"You won't believe how good this book is. You'll feel as stupid as I did for not knowing each and every one of these creators of the tangiest, freshest, prose, poetry, and the best stories I've read in years. A few are old pals, but most were thrilling surprises that I'd drive 1000 miles to talk to. There's a commonality of excellence and intention here, overlaid like the rings of tree, one sustaining the other. The youngest voices resonate with the traditions of their elders. The elders have been marked by the vast, flinty, 'just so' mind of Gary Snyder, whose sensibilities surround the next inner core of old Ainu, Japanese, and Native American sensibilities surrounding the heartwood itself - the wide, singing throat of Nature. I'll keep this book the rest of my life and you will, too." - Peter Coyote